Light rushes through into form, these pieces in my hands. What is conceived is born. I blow and blow. Words exchanged twine us into place, woven together again and again for every pulling apart. What is born takes up space, creates eddies, moans and harmonies.

You are all fire and spit, spoiling for clash, honoring the fight that made you what you are, turning the sharp edge over and again in your mouth, honing.

Burn clean and hot my love. I will be your lamp glass and the hand that raises you in the dark.

It has been winter in our hearts. The pulsed flow of things, the inevitability of shift, has been hidden from us. We thought we were looking straight on, we were, we were looking straight on and the intensity of our focus masked the shifts in the periphery, what we knew but only underground, unnamed and unspoken.

Now everything is broken open and the air smells complicated. In all the rush and tumble, our gears fit together. Surprising. The sun polishes your breastplate. You raise your spear and I blow the judgement horn.

I found the small bottle in a scattering on the ground, flung from a bursting of luggage. It had a round bulb body that I cupped my palm around, curling my hand to make it small enough to support the tiny thing. First I saw that it was almost empty and the lid was missing. Then I saw the breakage around the lip and I mourned the loss, the oil and the bottle and the lid. The carelessness. Such soft sweetness, vanilla.

The goddess is in the sweetness. And in the fragileness and the sharp edges and the clear bulb that changes the light. The delicacy, and the expanse of white linoleum. She is the travel itself. The goddess is in the palm that lifts and holds the broken thing, taking it back, receiving it in, claiming it all, the sweetness and the effort that cast it out and broke the lip and lost the lid and spilled itself across the floor. All of it, all of it is her.

I am in her hands. Light passes through me. Sweetness thrills the air.

I have been encased in ice, glacial, that pressure, huge, those forces of immobility meeting at the point where I am, my breast bone, shoulders, belly, spine.

I have been still, held, silent.

I go to the wellspring. I go down on my knees, eyes cast down, a shuddering breath.

She takes my face in her hands. She takes my face and lifts it to hers. I am bathed in radiance. I am filled with breath.

She whistles the worms from my hair, combs her fingers through to loose the grit and twigs, the bones of small things long extinct. She combs me clean, calls me by my name, calls me into myself where I sit, face to face with her infinite grace.

“Remember this,” she says. “You don’t have to hold anything. You are the burnished surface in which beauty seeks itself. Be that.”

I am in the wood, among the trees, the thin bright aspen, white as bone. I am standing smack up against a tree, like it’s a wall I’ve run into. Forehead, chest, belly – all the hot and the soft places pressed up against the immovable. I fold my arms around it.

It folds its arms around me.

Its not a tree. It’s Deerman. Deerman whom I’d mistaken for a tree, so still he is. So rooted in belonging.

I am so glad to have found him, to have come home to this, his hands spread warm across my back.

Hush, he says, without speaking. Hush, though I haven’t made a sound, just this grinding of my bones, this pressure, this resistance to stillness, to yielding, this growl under my skin.